BookNews

In 2015, twenty-one kids across America sued the federal government over climate change, arguing their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property were being violated. Theirs was to be the civil rights trial of our century. But it hasn’t happened. Instead, their day in court – Oct. 29, 2018 – slipped by while Trump Administration deployed rare legal tactics to stymie the case, leaving our nation’s courts in a tangle and legal experts aghast. While they wait, they hate it, they say, when people tell them they are America’s last hope to halt climate change. Why, they wonder, has our nation abdicated this responsibility to them?

Theirs is a story of the drastic consequence of the convenient half-measures of our time. Beginning with their cancelled trial, it intersects with the Dakota Access Pipeline, Hurricane Michael’s devastation, and the decimation of a California town by wildfire. Along the way, it raises critical questions of responsibility, both for a president at war with the truth, and for the press and activists who hail these youth as saviors, shrugging off their own grown-up failures.